14 DAY TRIAL // According to a warning published by The National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre (NISCC), UK IT infrastructure is a target for the hackers from Asia.
"While the majority of the observed attacks have been against central government, other UK organisations, companies and individuals are also at risk," the NISCC added.
According to NISCC the attackers were using Trojan e-mails to gain access to the systems. The attacks normally focus on individuals who have jobs working with commercially or economically sensitive data, the NISCC said.
"The attackers' aim appears to be covert gathering and transmitting of commercially or economically valuable information." said NISCC
"We have never seen anything like this in terms of the industrial scale of this series of attacks," NISCC Director Roger Cumming said. "This is not a few hackers sitting in their bedroom trying to steal bank account details from individuals."
It said determining the origin of the attacks - which have been under way for a significant period of time - was extremely difficult. The agency said it had traced IP addresses in the emails back to "the far east", but did not specify any countries.